updated 04:40 pm EDT, Fri March 27, 2009

AMD and Havok demo Cloth

At the currently ongoing Game Developers Conference on Thursday, chipmaker AMD was demonstrating Havok's physics middleware on its platforms for the first time, including the premiere display of the first OpenCL-supported Havok Cloth character- and environment-enhancing software. Havok is the latest graphics Software Development Kit to be compatible with ATI Stream technology that uses multi-core architecture to provide faster processing, utilizing both the CPU and GPU for computational tasks related to graphics processing.

As the name implies, Havok Cloth is a real-time cloth simulation, adding realistic elements such as flags fluttering in the wind, loose-fitting clothing and flowing character hair. Havok is calling the effect as being "movie-quality."

AMD claims that using both the CPU and GPU for physics should help game developers save users from having to buy high-end video cards to overcome bottlenecks in performance.